Post by Wilhelm Opens-the-Way on Feb 7, 2011 15:44:14 GMT -8
"All warfare is based on deception boy. Don't you ever forget that. Sun Tsu. If you are going to be stealing books, you should read something worth reading," he spat, "Not some useless fairy stories."
I whispered, barely audibly the next koan in the text, "Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."
"What?" asked my father, panting with incredulity.
I rolled to the blade he had slapped from my hand and sweeping it into my grasp, leapt up to my feet and cut his face in one swift motion. Already near the hole to one of the four old dumbwaiter shafts, I held the blade close to my chest, tucked my hands and feet together and fell.
Suggested Listening: Spiritus Electus - GRV
It had been a no-win scenario. I was to die. I was only eight years old and I knew this. I was a very practical wolf-boy by that age. My father had finally come to do what my mother could not. He had come to kill the Metis stain on his reputation, so well hidden until now. I knew this, and something changed in me. I had felt more than just my first change with Clara beneath the cupboard. I had also felt Rage. Rage at what it meant for me. I wanted to live. I wanted to hurt him. So I cut my father's face with his own blade, and I felt his rage grow in him, like a detonation, and I fell.
Even before I began to fully feel the weight of gravity pull me down into the small dumbwaiter shaft that would take me from the third floor dining hall to the depths of the basement scullery, perhaps breaking my bones in the process, I saw him begin to change. His eyes flashed from blue to wolfen gold, silver fur sprouted from his pores, his great arms knocking free the lamps and candles from the table, splashing lamp-oil and fire over the black-out curtains and his face cracked wide into long jaws and his knees shifted and bent. All this before my face had dropped below the edge of the floor.
The fuse of his rage had been lit long before my birth, back when he had met my mother, an impossible romance amid war never-ending. I was the issue of that hopeless affair. I was a reminder of how he had failed.
I dared not stop my fall, I reached out to the walls with my claws only enough to keep my downward velocity from turning my bones into handfuls of broken children's blocks when I struck the basement floor four stories below me. I fell two floors before the terrible crash from above. It was my father, in full Crinos war-form, carving the hole of the dumbwaiter shaft into a massive gouge large enough for him to roar and rage and thrash down into the deep, dark hole into which I had consigned myself. In another instant, his claws and fangs would be upon me.
But as I said, I was a very practical boy by that age. And this was my house, ever so much more than mother's who only came to the manor once or twice in the summer season every year or so. I lived in these walls. Their hidden passages and secrets were mine and mine alone to fully know. Not even the servants knew these hidden places as I did. I reached out my own clawed hands, as sure as any gymnasts and grasped the water pipe that lay between the floor of the third and second floors. It burst as I swung deeper along the wall, into the newer dumbwaiter shaft - the one that still had a working dumbwaiter - as the raging missile of my father tore past me through the walls to the scullery. The whole wing of the house shook as he landed in the basement, showered with a small mountain of the debris and water from the broken, gushing pipe, and any other remnants of the structure that he'd clawed from the walls during his frenzied descent after me.
I touched down on top of the dumbwaiter counterweight somewhere just below the second floor and cut the cord with a swipe of my claws and kicked out the emergency release I had wedged into place above the counterweight earlier that night. The instant the counterweight rope was cut the floor beneath me was torn asunder by a roaring Crinos seeking my blood. The scrapes and bruises from my earlier descent would have yielded more than enough for him to track.
I had earlier stuffed the dumbwaiter full of every piece of silver I could find. Knives, forks, mother's tea-set, the decorative hooks used to display pheasants from hunts in the countryside. It was packed to the brim with that, and the iron fire place grills of every hearth in the house that I could lift up to the third floor for weight in the weeks before my father's arrival. It was nearly the weight of half of mother's motorcar, or the piano in the hall, and with the counterweight rope cut, it jerked me upward toward the roof house like a shot, and sent the dumbwaiter full of bladed silver crashing down like an almost literal ton of bricks. It shattered instantly upon contact with my father's massive snapping jaws, filling his mouth with silver blades and bric-a-brac, causing him to howl in pain and surprise and loose his footing. He went back down to the basement in a shower of silverware, iron and unspooling rope as I flew upward arm wrenched out of socket on the opposing rope.
As I rocketed past the third floor on my way up into the rooftop winch house where the dumbwaiter’s pulleys spun and sparked and smoked, I felt the heat of the flames from the burning curtains and saw the bright flash of fire that had burst the windows outward onto the lawns. The house would have been visible for miles with the enforced blackouts to confuse the German bombers. But I had no time to consider those implications, as I barreled through the roof of the winching shed at the rooftop and spilled out upon the moonlit rooftop with a clatter of wood and pulley wheels.
For a moment the world was silent save for the windy rooftop and the hiss of the broken water pipe somewhere in the middle of the house. Somehow I still carried my father's blade, the blade of an English RAF officer, a saber. It was of a poorer than normal quality steel, and wouldn't have a chance of truly hurting my father, but I clung to it anyway. It was a symbol of defiance.
Then two sounds chilled my bones. Above me, the unmistakable sound of aeroplanes overhead. I hadn't counted on that. Our house was alight with flame, the only lit marker in an otherwise black countryside just northwest of London in time of war. The Luftwaffe had seen us as clear as the moon itself in the clear night. The second sound was a howl from below in the depths of the house.; the growl of my father peeling silverware out of his flesh where it had been lodged by a piano's weight of iron and velocity.
There was nowhere for me to go. The rooftop, stories above the ground offered only a long drop and a bitter stop at the bottom spiked with fences of Victorian iron. I hazarded a look down at the deepest shaft of the broken winch house. The moon stared back at me through a puddle of growing water. The roar of the bomber engines grew closer. In the far shaft, I could hear my father tearing his way up the house to get me, to kill me.
The moon above was blackened for a moment by falling bombs. When the moon below in the darkness of the final shaft re-appeared, my father was already leaping up through the roof of the house in an explosion of tile and grout and wood.
"BETRAYAL!" he roared in the High tongue as I leapt to my death down the long dark shaft. The moon, the silvery moon below rippled in shadow. I closed my eyes, thought of Clara's soft lips, my mother's touch, and of someplace far, far away from the Rage and shame of my father. The bombs whined in the air like the buzzing of a million bees. I was smiling like an idiot when the first one struck the manor, bouncing me like a pinball down the shaft, snapping the sword I still held in my hand against the uneven grout of the hole. The blade clattered somewhere, the hilt twisted in my hand until I felt some of the bones go, but the loop of the saber and a small length of the blade stayed fast. The roar of the bombs was louder than the roar of my father as I struck the bottom of the shaft and shattered the mirror of the moon.
I whispered, barely audibly the next koan in the text, "Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."
"What?" asked my father, panting with incredulity.
I rolled to the blade he had slapped from my hand and sweeping it into my grasp, leapt up to my feet and cut his face in one swift motion. Already near the hole to one of the four old dumbwaiter shafts, I held the blade close to my chest, tucked my hands and feet together and fell.
Suggested Listening: Spiritus Electus - GRV
It had been a no-win scenario. I was to die. I was only eight years old and I knew this. I was a very practical wolf-boy by that age. My father had finally come to do what my mother could not. He had come to kill the Metis stain on his reputation, so well hidden until now. I knew this, and something changed in me. I had felt more than just my first change with Clara beneath the cupboard. I had also felt Rage. Rage at what it meant for me. I wanted to live. I wanted to hurt him. So I cut my father's face with his own blade, and I felt his rage grow in him, like a detonation, and I fell.
Even before I began to fully feel the weight of gravity pull me down into the small dumbwaiter shaft that would take me from the third floor dining hall to the depths of the basement scullery, perhaps breaking my bones in the process, I saw him begin to change. His eyes flashed from blue to wolfen gold, silver fur sprouted from his pores, his great arms knocking free the lamps and candles from the table, splashing lamp-oil and fire over the black-out curtains and his face cracked wide into long jaws and his knees shifted and bent. All this before my face had dropped below the edge of the floor.
The fuse of his rage had been lit long before my birth, back when he had met my mother, an impossible romance amid war never-ending. I was the issue of that hopeless affair. I was a reminder of how he had failed.
I dared not stop my fall, I reached out to the walls with my claws only enough to keep my downward velocity from turning my bones into handfuls of broken children's blocks when I struck the basement floor four stories below me. I fell two floors before the terrible crash from above. It was my father, in full Crinos war-form, carving the hole of the dumbwaiter shaft into a massive gouge large enough for him to roar and rage and thrash down into the deep, dark hole into which I had consigned myself. In another instant, his claws and fangs would be upon me.
But as I said, I was a very practical boy by that age. And this was my house, ever so much more than mother's who only came to the manor once or twice in the summer season every year or so. I lived in these walls. Their hidden passages and secrets were mine and mine alone to fully know. Not even the servants knew these hidden places as I did. I reached out my own clawed hands, as sure as any gymnasts and grasped the water pipe that lay between the floor of the third and second floors. It burst as I swung deeper along the wall, into the newer dumbwaiter shaft - the one that still had a working dumbwaiter - as the raging missile of my father tore past me through the walls to the scullery. The whole wing of the house shook as he landed in the basement, showered with a small mountain of the debris and water from the broken, gushing pipe, and any other remnants of the structure that he'd clawed from the walls during his frenzied descent after me.
I touched down on top of the dumbwaiter counterweight somewhere just below the second floor and cut the cord with a swipe of my claws and kicked out the emergency release I had wedged into place above the counterweight earlier that night. The instant the counterweight rope was cut the floor beneath me was torn asunder by a roaring Crinos seeking my blood. The scrapes and bruises from my earlier descent would have yielded more than enough for him to track.
I had earlier stuffed the dumbwaiter full of every piece of silver I could find. Knives, forks, mother's tea-set, the decorative hooks used to display pheasants from hunts in the countryside. It was packed to the brim with that, and the iron fire place grills of every hearth in the house that I could lift up to the third floor for weight in the weeks before my father's arrival. It was nearly the weight of half of mother's motorcar, or the piano in the hall, and with the counterweight rope cut, it jerked me upward toward the roof house like a shot, and sent the dumbwaiter full of bladed silver crashing down like an almost literal ton of bricks. It shattered instantly upon contact with my father's massive snapping jaws, filling his mouth with silver blades and bric-a-brac, causing him to howl in pain and surprise and loose his footing. He went back down to the basement in a shower of silverware, iron and unspooling rope as I flew upward arm wrenched out of socket on the opposing rope.
As I rocketed past the third floor on my way up into the rooftop winch house where the dumbwaiter’s pulleys spun and sparked and smoked, I felt the heat of the flames from the burning curtains and saw the bright flash of fire that had burst the windows outward onto the lawns. The house would have been visible for miles with the enforced blackouts to confuse the German bombers. But I had no time to consider those implications, as I barreled through the roof of the winching shed at the rooftop and spilled out upon the moonlit rooftop with a clatter of wood and pulley wheels.
For a moment the world was silent save for the windy rooftop and the hiss of the broken water pipe somewhere in the middle of the house. Somehow I still carried my father's blade, the blade of an English RAF officer, a saber. It was of a poorer than normal quality steel, and wouldn't have a chance of truly hurting my father, but I clung to it anyway. It was a symbol of defiance.
Then two sounds chilled my bones. Above me, the unmistakable sound of aeroplanes overhead. I hadn't counted on that. Our house was alight with flame, the only lit marker in an otherwise black countryside just northwest of London in time of war. The Luftwaffe had seen us as clear as the moon itself in the clear night. The second sound was a howl from below in the depths of the house.; the growl of my father peeling silverware out of his flesh where it had been lodged by a piano's weight of iron and velocity.
There was nowhere for me to go. The rooftop, stories above the ground offered only a long drop and a bitter stop at the bottom spiked with fences of Victorian iron. I hazarded a look down at the deepest shaft of the broken winch house. The moon stared back at me through a puddle of growing water. The roar of the bomber engines grew closer. In the far shaft, I could hear my father tearing his way up the house to get me, to kill me.
The moon above was blackened for a moment by falling bombs. When the moon below in the darkness of the final shaft re-appeared, my father was already leaping up through the roof of the house in an explosion of tile and grout and wood.
"BETRAYAL!" he roared in the High tongue as I leapt to my death down the long dark shaft. The moon, the silvery moon below rippled in shadow. I closed my eyes, thought of Clara's soft lips, my mother's touch, and of someplace far, far away from the Rage and shame of my father. The bombs whined in the air like the buzzing of a million bees. I was smiling like an idiot when the first one struck the manor, bouncing me like a pinball down the shaft, snapping the sword I still held in my hand against the uneven grout of the hole. The blade clattered somewhere, the hilt twisted in my hand until I felt some of the bones go, but the loop of the saber and a small length of the blade stayed fast. The roar of the bombs was louder than the roar of my father as I struck the bottom of the shaft and shattered the mirror of the moon.
